Data from: Combining human acceptance and habitat suitability in a unified socio-ecological suitability model: a case study of the wolf in Switzerland ...

Habitat suitability models (HSMs) are commonly used in conservation practise to assess the potential of an area to be occupied and colonised. A major limitation of these models, however, is the omission of spatially explicit understanding of human acceptance towards the focal species. As wildlife is...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Behr, Dominik M., Ozgul, Arpat, Cozzi, Gabriele
Format: Dataset
Language:English
Published: Dryad 2018
Subjects:
Online Access:https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.t4t73
https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.t4t73
Description
Summary:Habitat suitability models (HSMs) are commonly used in conservation practise to assess the potential of an area to be occupied and colonised. A major limitation of these models, however, is the omission of spatially explicit understanding of human acceptance towards the focal species. As wildlife is more and more subject to human-dominated landscapes, ignoring the sociological component will result in misrepresentation of the observed processes and inappropriate management. We distributed 10 000 questionnaires across Switzerland and identified key socio-demographical factors correlated with human acceptance of the wolf. We then created a spatially explicit acceptance model based on geo-referenced socio-demographical, social and geographical information. Finally, we combined our acceptance model with a HSM to obtain a unified socio-ecological suitability model, which included human and ecological components. We showed that the key factors associated with human acceptance were perception of how harmful the ... : Questionnaire responsesquestionnaire_responses.csv ...